It is 11.52 am GMT on Christmas Day, Tuesday, 25 December 2001 and, fortified by the Apostolic Blessing that Pope John-Paul II has just I+N The Name of the One, Holy & Undivided Trinity imparted Urbi et Orbi (to this entire Planet as well as to its capital City), while I cannot, as he just did, address you in 60 languages, including Irish and Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew, Aramaic and Maori, English and Maltese, Greek and Latin, I most sincerely join him in wishing each and every one of you, your families and all the many groups and associations to which you severally belong Life, Health, Light & Strength.

In anticipation of the same now 81 years old Carol Wojtyla's pilgrimage of Peace to Assisi where he hopes to meet and pray with other world religious leaders on Wednesday, 23 January 2002, and of Channel-4 TV's transmission on Monday, 11 February, of Graham Hancock's interview with my also 81-years-old, Qrendi born, Maltese friend, Joseph S. Ellul of Zurrieq, I also recall with pleasure my lecture "The '12th' Planet: Origin of Earth & Home of Man's Creator - Zecharia Sitchin's Hypothesis, a Preliminary Assessment."

Much has transpired since I was privileged within that context to share with a large audience of well informed friends and colleagues my then perspective on that subject and, of course, a potentially endless assortment of further questions at a meeting of R.I.L.K.O. (Research Into Lost Knowledge Organization) in South Kensington, on the evening of Friday, 31 March 1995, when the New Moon was in Aries.

The thumbnail image exhibited above is one I have just scanned from the front cover of my own personal copy of the 1992 3rd edition of Paul I. Micallef's Mnajdra Prehistoric Temple - A Calendar in Stone (1st edition: Malta, 1989). It shows Sunrise at the Equinox on 21 March as seen nowadays by anyone looking through the main entrance to the lower of the Mnajdra complex's main two surviving and, according to Professor Vere Gordon Childe's personal on-site estimation, 12,000-years-old prehistoric structures. These are located at 35º 49' 40" North, 14º 26' 15" East, in the ancient village and parish of Qrendi, Malta, where Joseph S. Ellul, was born and grew up, playing and working in, among other places, this very spot, where, quite naturally, the incised triangle on the threshold floor soon aroused his interest and close attention.

"Someone else has suggested that this triangle, which actually measures 35" × 38" × 38", has preserved for us the exact length of '1 prehistoric yard'! When I examined this triangle on paper as well as on the spot, I discovered that the angle at its apex is one of 56º, which is the angle subtended by the solstices of the Sun. The azimuth or compass-direction of the lines is 62º and 118º respectively, which corresponds with the declination of the solstices: 28º North and 28º South of East, 90º".

That quotation and its associated image are from a most important Chapter about Mnajdra in his own 1988 published book, which also includes details of its and several other Maltese and Gozitan prehistoric temples' clearly intentional and quite specific solar and/or lunar alignments.

(On 18 December 1994 what looked to me like a pretty Full Moon rose over the local horizon at approximately 6 pm in such a way that its first beams fell, so far as I and Melanie Small could then observe from our position inside Mnajdra, along the path marked in this illustration as being that of the rising Sun at its Summer Solstice. That seems reasonable.)

RILKO-member John E. Palmer of the Hague some years ago circulated an interesting paper about several aspects of these same Mnajdra 'temples', which refers to the above mentioned 'triangle' [John's accompanying photograph of this was first published in R.I.L.K.O. Journal, no. 20] and to one of the finely shaped, deeply embedded foresight- or marking-stones which have, as Joseph mentions, survived for thousands of years as helpful indicators of where, in this instance, the equinox Sun will be seen to rise relatively to the main entrance of the lower 'temple' there.

Although the second surviving marker known to Joseph is still in excellent condition, the one some 440 yards East of that entrance that most concerns us here was, as previously mentioned, deliberately and professionally vandalised shortly before 27 March 2001.

I am in a position to report that because, although Joseph S. Ellul and I had found it still in its usual place and in excellent condition during the first week of November 2000, on 27 March 2001 we both noticed how it had been very recently, crudely and savagely hacked at by someone equipped with the requisite professional tools, yet clearly lacking the skill needed to use them properly.

The drill marks, for instance, were still fresh. The stone no longer displayed its former nobility of shape.

Nevertheless, most of the stone was still there - and it was just as deeply and firmly embedded in place as it had always been. If this was one of those attempts to tamper with ancient evidence, such as Flinders Petrie noticed in the neighbourbood of the Great Pyramid, it was clumsy and on this occasion, essentially at least, unsuccessful.

Not that that is by any means the only misfortune that has recently befallen Mnajdra and, pace David Icke (in his Children of the Matrix, ISBN 0 9538810 1 6, May 2001, p.56), I don't think any of the officials at the Smithsonian Institute can be made "to carry the can" for all of these.

Neither are the normal day-to-day operations in the neighbouring stone-quarry, including the blastings and explosions, in any sense to blame for all the recent mindless defacement of and wanton damage inflicted on these ancient structures, whose unique significance Professor Colin Renfrew has more than once acknowledged. The 3rd, fully revised and expanded edition of his and Paul Bahn's Archaeology - Theories, Methods and Practice (Thames & Hudson, 2000) also makes clear what a great deal our professional researchers still have to learn. For instance, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's Genes, Peoples and Languages (Allen Lane - The Penguin Press, 2000), although itself an admirable tour de force, already requires revision.

John E. Palmer describes Mnajdra's two adjacent 'temples' as structurally independent of each other and most other writers, whether popular or academic, have this impression, but it is actually doubly mistaken - firstly, because "the lower temple" never was 'a temple' at all but, most probably, a dwelling for a resident priestess and/or priest together with her, his or their household (children? companions? domestic animals?), and secondly, because it was only very recently, and after the competent Maltese authorities had arranged for the clearing of the external pedestrian passage-way that isolates one outside wall of the upper-temple from any possible contact with the neighbouring outside wall of the lower structure, that bad storms and heavy rain first managed to wash away what little basic support the authorities hadn't already deprived that stretch of upper wall of.

Whether or not they were academically wise, the original builders, of course, like their successors the medieval masons, knew much more than do the vast majority of present-day dons about time and weather, gravity and space, stones and numbers. They understood the need not to include any passage-way between these two buildings in their plans, and so they most carefully ensured that both walls, in effect, buttressed each other, by being so constructed and shaped that, if they fell at all, they would fall outwards, and yet at the same time that they could not fall outwards, because the space into which any fall would carry them had already been very carefully filled in with a mixture of stones and close-packed earth.

My imagination isn't running away; Vere Gordon Childe's surviving plan of Mnajdra clearly indicates the presence of all this packing and support material. Like Professor Luigi Ugolini he well understood why it had been put there.

Contrast your own experience when strolling down the modern stone causeway from Ħaġar Qim to Mnajdra with the effort needed to complete your uphill return journey. Yet, although the slope here is so obviously steep, even those town-and-city dwellers who are deeply enough in love with the countryside to visit it frequently do rather tend to view it exclusively through romantic eyes; they seem to lack the native villagers' hardy annual and almost innately instinctive appreciation of the earth's - and its stones' basic possibilities and requirements, and, of course, town-bred archaeologists and other officials and academics are, in this respect, only very seldom exceptions. J. R. R. Tolkien, for instance, seems to have remained until the very end of his days a quite incurable romantic.

Women, of course, have always been for the most part much more practically minded than men, as well as tending to be more finely attuned to their surroundings. So perhaps Margaret Murray wasn't entirely mistaken when, I have been told, she suggested that it was women who built most, if not all of Malta's prehistoric structures.

Joseph Ellul, I know, will have none of this, and he is greatly displeased that in the printed and still in print 1994 German edition of his book the note accompanying illustration 17 has been so badly translated as to convey the very opposite sense to that of his original English, which runs: "A sixth statue from this later set. The label below, put there by Sir Temi Zammit, reads: 'HEADLESS STATUETTE OF GLOBIGERINA LIMESTONE REPRESENTING A STANDING NAKED FIGURE OF MALE SEX. IT HAS BEEN CUT FROM A FLAT BLOCK. ON THE UPPER SURACE THERE IS A CENTRALLY PLACED HOLE, PERHAPS OF MODERN WORKMANSHIP.' (page 27)."

In its Internet edition, the present translation is correct, but I must apologise for the rather inferior quality of the electronic version of several of the original illustrations, which were, of course, prepared for use in a technically quite differently demanding medium. As well as admiring Joseph's loyalty to Temi, who was always a good friend of his father, I readily admit that both in tone and content his discussion of the sexual characteristics exhibited by various surviving prehistoric statuettes found on Malta is reasonable. I am also strongly inclined to agree with him that Margaret Murray's and a whole crowd of more recent writers' repetition ad nauseam of what is probably a very largely mythical account of a primordial Mother Goddess fertility cult needs to be transcended, as, I am sure, to an increasing degree it soon will be - not, however, in the direction of that equally misguided belief in our early forefathers' having typically and primordially had an insatiable lust for the shedding "in sacrifice" of either human or animal blood - as if Cain's murdering of Abel was always and everywhere our forefathers' paradigm of how best to please the Gods...

But to get back to RILKO and the Smithsonian Institute (and Joseph S. Ellul has kindly given me sight of some of his correspondence with that august body prior…

Is Mnajdra truly a calendar in stone?

Joseph S. Ellul has kindly given me sight of some of his correspondence about this prior to and immediately after one particular recent disaster at Ħaġar Qim, which is situated no more than about 800 yards further up the hill on which the Mnajdra complex stands), there is, I am sorry to say, much that is incorrect in the 6-page article, "Alignments along the main axes at Mnajdra temple" by Ing. Chris Micallef [B.Mech.Eng.(Hons), M.Inst.C.M., Eur.Ing, MBA (Henley), with grateful acknowledgements to Professor Frank Ventura of the University of Malta and emeritus Professor Maelee Thomson Foster of the University of Florida], which I have just read on pages 16-21 of issue 59 of the R.I.L.K.O. Journal (enquiries to Hon. Chairman Mr. Robert Harris, 70 Cambridge Road, Teddington, Middlesex TW11 8DN).

Some may find this surprising, since his close relative's already mentioned and similarly focussed 1989 book, Mnajdra Prehistoric Temple - A Calendar in Stone, has already gone though several editions and is still in print.

On 21 December 2001, one of my more mathematically gifted e-mail correspondents reminded me that he who holds knowledge should be willing to grant others access to it whenever circumstances so counsel. I shan't repeat here, albeit in a different order, all the various relevant points that have already been made elsewhere on this website. Note, however, that I still strongly agree with Bernard Lonergan that, even when data and their interpretation cannot entirely be separated, their distinction is clear - and with Cardinal Newman that any natural maturation of judgment normally requires that detachment from poetry be conjoined with meticulous attention to a plethora of frequently tedious details, many of which are utterly prosaic. We, if not Queen Victoria, might be amused if David Icke invited us to join him in viewing Queen Elizabeth II, who, apparently, is in some sense the former's reincarnation, as a giant, green, fire-breathing reptile, but what contributes mightily to our own and our children's enjoyment in The Lord of the Rings is rather less welcome in such contexts as those to which Icke purports to address himself - and the importance of those contexts is very considerable indeed.

Here, then, I make no attempt to emulate even Anton Mifsud's half-hearted disparagement of the endeavours of our present academic establishment (cf. his Foreword to Anton & Simon Mifsud, Chris Agius Sultana & Charles Savona Ventura, Malta - Echoes of Plato's Island(ISBN 99932-15-01-5; 2000; 2nd edition 2001). To the contrary, I am full of praise for Andrew Sinclair's admirably researched, fascinatingly presented and beautifully illustrated The Secret Scroll (ISBN 0 9537398 6 4; 2001) on page 1 of which stands written: "... The lost city of Atlantis has been located in Peru and off Land's End. How will this ever end? I hope in this book. I am a trained historian. I deal in probability, backed by fact, rather than speculation. I intend to demonstrate..."

Not an echo of Plato's island that, I know, but almost the echo of one of Joseph Ellul's published statements about his own published work: "I know it is very hard to change an opinion that has been instilled or perhaps indoctrinated in the minds of people for several generations, but the new opinions I present are backed by the proof of facts, facts that nobody can deny. I am not very fond of theories, but I do like theorems because they lead to some proven result."

Unlike Joseph Ellul and Andrew Sinclair, I know next to nothing about masonry or, for that matter, about Freemasonry generally either, or about English Masonry's continuing and readily politically understandable official denial of its own pre-Hanoverian pedigree in particular. In fact, and despite my interest in the exploits and genealogy of Robin Hood who is, I have noticed, mentioned in the Scotichronicon, I, unlike my sister, still know very little about Robert the Bruce, Kilwinning's place in Scotland's history or that surviving masonic stained- glass window she once showed me inside the stairwell of one of royal Irvine's seaside mansions.

On the other hand, I am in some degree aware of the important rôle Rennes-le-Château and l'abbé Bérenger Saunière may have more recently had vis-à-vis the dialectical development of Templar, Rosicrucian and Masonic traditions. Consequently, I think I know enough to feel obliged here to affirm that, even if your only interest in mediaeval knighthood stems from a wish truly to understand the intricate complexities of Mediterranean and Catholic Malta's highly particular past (which will also oblige you to come to appreciate how almost all the inhabitants of two islands so sillily or cannily described by historians as having been without even a minimum Christian presence throughout the greater part of their Islamic occupation should so quickly and fervently have re-embraced Catholicism afterwards - so that English-speaking Freemasons are clearly not alone in heeding Jesus of Nazareth's advice about our need to cultivate the wisdom of serpents), then Andrew Sinclair's most recent, proudly Nordic and quintessentially Scottish book about some surviving Knights Templar's self-transformation into Masons undoubtedly deserves its honoured place within your library:

• "We lifted the slabs to the second staircase, supposing they might lead down to the shrine, only to discover many feet of earth and sand beneath. the groundscan had not shown how deep were the vaults or the infill in the intervening spaces. This was a grave disappointment. We decided to call in core drillers in order to penetrate the roofs of the lower vaults. We would then lower a tube through the drill-hole and drop down an industrial endoscope. Its camera was the size of my little finger and as flexible as the head of a striking snake, and it could point at buried objects under the light of a laser beam. It could operate to a depth of   ten metres and, by passing light up glass fibres integral to the instrument, transmit in colour what the camera saw on to a monitor screen above ground. As we drilled deeper and deeper into the centre of the chapel, we struck rubble for ten feet and then the roof of the lower vault. It was three feet of solid stone. Finally, the drill bit broke through into open space. And then it jammed. There was no way of drawing it back. But after working night and day, we removed the drill and penetrated again into the lower vault and could introduce our pipe. Through it, the endoscope could drop into the chamber of the knights and the shrine, and film them there.
• So we believed. Again and again we pushed the pipe down the drill-hole. Again and again, infill poured into the crevices and blocked the pipe. Again we drilled through and brought back the bit. Again we introduced the pipe, this time with the endoscope inside the tube. As it almost reached the stone roof of the vault, we could see on the monitor dust and detritus clogging up the end of the pipe, filling in our little eyehole on the mystery that lies beneath..." (p.156.)

Joseph's book summarising the fruits of his own and three earlier generations of the Elluls' direct contact with the places I have just mentioned, and that both in English and in German is, as I have indicated, not without its blemishes, notably its continuing allegiance…

Joseph's book summarises the fruits of his own and three earlier generations of the Elluls' direct contact with Mnajdra and Ħaġar Qim, notably their continuing allegiance to the archaeological establishment's belief in primordial patriarchy as regards such crafts as building and farming, and their, to my mind, unjustified assumption that if fire was used, it was in association with a death-dealing rite of sacrifice, that if blood was shed, it was the blood of a suffering victim, and that if evidence of either of these phenomena was found, it was to be inferred that the implied modes of conduct dated back to the very origins of the building - and, of course, any building without some otherwise clearly transparent purpose, is bound to have been a 'temple' - why not an engineering factory, or a residential holiday-home, to mention just two alternative possibilities that spring to mind?

Despite these shortcomings, Joseph's book is clearly an essential contribution to the literature. It is a great pity that, unlike Joseph S. Abela and David Furlong, neither Paul I. Micallef nor his similarly interested relative, Chris Micallef have seen fit to include it among their references. They might so easily have spared themselves several mistakes.

Paul I. Micallef was born in 1931 and died a year or two ago; Chris, I take it, is now, like his own father Maurice Micallef, walking in Paul's footsteps, and all credit to him for that. Since Paul never quoted Joseph, even though he knew his work, it isn't at all surprising that Chris has never as yet found it helpful to quote him either. The probable reason for Paul's own otherwise astonishing reticence becomes obvious, I think, if we take another look at one particular paragraph in a Chapter in Joseph's book:

• "These pin-pointed directions towards the rising or setting of the Sun at the Equinox or Solstice, and not forgetting the Moon's Major Standstill positions, still hold perfectly good after a period of at least 8,000 years. This proves that the rotating and inclination positions of the Earth in relation to the Sun have not changed throughout that long period of time."

If he read that less than accurate statement of the facts of the matter, Paul could hardly understand it as anything other than a rejection of most of his own opinions, especially as he would not, of course, have been able to read even the first paragraph of the short note I have added to my Internet edition of Joseph's original text, and which I shall here attempt further to clarify by quoting just two paragraphs from Maurice Chatelain's Our Cosmic Ancestors (p.41):

• "We are nearly certain now that the periodic invasions of ice from the polar caps are caused by several overlapping astronomical cycles. Some of these cycles are well known while others are objects of heated debates and therefore of particular interest to me.
• The first of these cycles is the precession of the equinoxes, or the rotation of the axis of our planet around the pole of the ecliptic. The duration of this cycle is about 26,000 years." [Readers still unconvinced about the reality of this cycle are referred in particular both to Hamlet's Mill and to the works of Sir Norman Lockyer, Dr. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Professor Livio Catullo Stecchini and Peter Tompkins.] "The second cycle is that of the variation of the eccentricity of Earth's orbit around the Sun. Its duration is about 104,000 years. The third cycle is the combination of the first two and causes changes of temperature and humidity on our planet. This third cycle is about 21,000 years. The fourth cycle is that of the variable obliquity of our Earth's rotational axis in relation to the ecliptic and its duration is about 42,000 years. The fifth cycle, a combination of all previous cyclic changes and possibly one or two more unknown factors, is that of the ice ages. This is the cycle that no two scientists explain in the same way. Each geologist has his own theory and refuses all the others."

Paul Micallef hadn't only studied surveying, cartography and geodesy at university level, he had lectured extensively in mathematics and land-surveying; he had also been employed by the Maltese Government in connection with the 1983 revision of the 1:25000 scale map. Yet he never used a theodolite at Mnajdra, even though he undoubtedly had all the expertise required usefully so to do!

Indeed, he seems to have regarded that as a very good thing:

• "The logical conclusions were arrived at by simple mathematical reasoning and not by empirical formulae, suppositions or speculations." (From the, to me, quite astonishing Preface to the 1st edition of his book, italics added.)

Despite this claim to have avoided "speculation" he, in company with the still vast majority of writers with a "scientific" outlook, toyed with the usual but quite unscientific question of 'probability':

• "As I explained the optics..., one would have asked himself if the whole setup is merely a coincidence or not... The probability of a coincident alignment is 1:26,000... for a chance construction [it is 1:3,972,176,000,000,000,000]..." (Op.cit., pp. 11-12.)

As, however, Professor Gilbert Ryle had already grown to appreciate when we weren't even half-way through the 20th century, knowing the rules of inference is not possessing a body of information; it is knowing how. The rules of inference are performance rules.

Performance rules may sometimes be Procrustrean rules, such that whoever observes them is said to be acting correctly or legitimately, and whoever fails to observe them is thereby convicted of fallacy. But there are also canons of style, strategy, prudence, skills and tastes which resist any attempt to formulate them in precise terms. And the principles of inference seem to lie in this area.

At all events, we do not argue or infer or prove that a theory works; we show it working, and in this way the theory can be discovered, established and taught to others. Gilbert Ryle addressed himself to this manifestly important issue on several quite different occasions; here, however, I mention only his notably helpful Predicting and Inferring (in the symposium Observation and Interpretation, Butterworth, London, 1957, pp. 165-70).

More recently Doctor Peter Plichta has, moreover, quite cogently and scientifically clarified that in this particular world we inhabit there are no coincidences ever...

As Cardinal Newman had come to understand in the light of personal experience, the growth of true knowledge drastically reduces any science's residue of poetry (and Paul was, clearly, quite a poet) - but it also enormously improves (and ultimately simplifies) the quality and integrity of what credible prose remains.

Paul, of course, it goes without saying, never imagined he was a Cardinal Newman, and no doubt he would have been the first to feel uncomfortable about any attempt to promote any sort of posthumous apotheosis (which, unless corrected, Chris Micallef's most recent article more than half-suggests).

It is noteworthy that, in Paul Micallef's book, which so brilliantly started the whole family band-waggon rolling in this direction, none of the author's proffered calculations appear to have taken into account (1) that, though close to the sea, Mnajdra is not now situated at sea-level; (2) that when Mnajdra's surviving structures were first built there may not have been any sea at all in their immediate vicinity, since, as Temi Zammit mentions in his History of Malta, what is now the Mediterranean used to be no more than two (or, Joseph Ellul adds, at most three) fresh-water lakes divided by land-bridges from Africa to Europe, with at least one of these where Malta and Sicily now rest; and (3) that, in any case, the precise heights above sea-level of those portions of the hills on the Eastern and Western horizons where the Sun either rises or sets ought, in the interests of accuracy, necessarily to have been incorporated into the data used in his calculations, together, of course, with details of the original (as distinct from the present) locations and dimensions of any relevant roofs and walls, notably those at Mnajdra itself.

Even the most careful of readers may succumb to the beguiling spell of that neatly tabulated (at the foot of page 32 in the 1992 3rd edition of Paul's book) threefold assurance that the lower 'temple' at Mnajdra's "angle of obliquity East" is 24°.094. Yet despite the fascinating impression of precise accuracy conveyed by those three Arabic numerals after that decimal point, the truth of the matter is that the two figures preceding the decimal point used by the author at this stage in his presentation of the calculation of what purports to be the solstice azimuth were not based on his personal observations at all but have, clearly, been taken from either a reference-book or some other similarly mindless source, such as a specialist computer program.

What makes this obvious is the fact that these figures are valid only at the Equator! Azimuth 24° at the Equator is, typically, about 30° in Malta, while at Stonehenge it is about 45° - though, obviously, as I have just mentioned, other factors need also to be taken into account.

Captain Bruce Cathie, the well known New Zealand civil aviation pilot, has published several best-selling books about flying-saucers, about how the force of gravity varies as a function of a body's change in latitude and/or longitude and very interestingly, among other things, about the circumstances in which atomic bombs may and may not successfully be detonated. Since calculations of this sort need to be very precise, an improved, recently updated computer program commissioned by the Captain to facilitate such calculations is currently being advertized in Nexus magazine.

I have, and have both used and corresponded with Bruce about, the earlier version of his Gridworks program. Although somewhat lacking in all those bells, whistles and other trimmings computer buffs have grown to expect, it does the job it claims to do, and I am, assuredly not the only RILKO member already familiar both with it and with the other details of Bruce's painstaking work. I suggest that if Chris Micallef is not yet of their number, he make himself acquainted with it as soon as that becomes practically feasible.

Consider next Paul's allegedly supposition- and speculation-free:

Paul Micallef wrote:

• "Distant markers or foresights might have been natural alignment points (tree, cleft or notch), but holes with stakes or stone pillars might have been another possibility..." (Mnajdra Prehistoric Temple - A Calendar in Stone, p.12.)

Yes, they might have been, but what they were is, as it happens, still a matter of clear empirical fact!

Part of the underlying explanation, by the way, is that this gentleman's main hobby was never prehistoric temples; it was sundials - about which he had some most interesting and fascinating things to say.

So, Paul wanted Mnajdra to shine most brilliantly as some sort of super-sundial.

Consequently, and most successfully, that is how he went on to show Mnajdra to the world.

On the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, 8 December 1989 (which the Roman Catholic Church, as usual, celebrated in anticipation of its subsequent commemoration of her own Nativity on 8 September 1990, an obvious point which at least one Christian lecturer in Divinity of my acquaintance seems never to have appreciated) First Secretary Michail Gorbachev and President George Bush senior met on Malta for their historic summit.

By this time Paul had already dedicated to the pair of them the very first edition of his book. On 4 December 1989 Henricus Yucharevichus, the Director of Soviet Television, had arranged for a documentary about Mnajdra.

In April 1990 another film about Mnajdra produced by two of Paul's close relatives, Maurice Micallef and the latter's son, Chris, was shown to an international audience under Council of Europe auspices and, in June that same year, a North American Associate Professor of Architecture, Maelee Thomson Foster, made her own recording of the Summer Solstice event at Mnajdra itself, and, as subsequent editions of Paul's book have documented, interest continues to grow.

The image I incorporated into the title of this short related piece of my own is, for instance, very similar to that used in a large poster announcing the exhibition, "People and Religions", which was held at the Cathedral Museum in Malta's most ancient capital, Mdina, from 3 to 20 October 1991.

Strange that although Paul Micallef knew more than enough about land-surveying to recognize, and to mention in his book, the quite extraordinary nature of the Misqa prehistoric water-tanks about 330 yards North of Mnajdra, he never paused to ask himself by what sort of miracle of X-ray vision the ancient builders had learned where to dig, or rather, excavate for water, as they did, and that successfully, and in a most unlikely situation.

Study the information about Malta's water-table, its stones and its geology in the excellent Museum of Natural History in Mdina, and you may begin to form some idea of why I believe there is something almost miraculous about those seven Misqa tanks.

My complaint here, however, isn't about what Paul didn't feel called to write about, but with what he actually did write:

• "As the azimuth of the centre-line facing the equinox sunrise had been established, the dating of the temple required a meticulous search for some form of landmarks, or holes as foresights. Luckily, Mr Neville Ferry discovered a large hole a few hundred feet away from the lower temple and in the direction of the winter solstice... It was concluded that it must have served as a forsesight for the winter solstice alignment during the construction of Mnajdra Temple. The dating of the temple was computed with reference to this hole by Mr A. Xuereb." (op. cit., p.30.)

How's that for avoiding speculation? Bad weather, we are told by the authorities, recently conspired to wreak all that damage on various massive prehistoric structures at both Mnajdra and Ħaġar Qim that had thitherto managed to survive there... Yet Government advisor P. I. Micallef was never threatened with dismissal, when he allowed himself to be convinced that something no more substantial than "a large hole" had managed to survive not merely whatever ravages throughout the ages have conspired to reduce those temples to their present state, but also that it had somehow contrived to remain exactly as it was, "a large hole" throughout the course of who knows how many years elapsed between the Mnajdra temples' original construction and their first falling out of human use - as if it were at all likely that masons able to calculate and build as those ancients could, would ever elect to rely on the continuing existence of "a large hole" as a solsticial or any other sort of foresight- or marker-stone!

Note, however, that I am not here denying that those builders may, indeed, have chosen regularly to mark the solar solstices - but simply that, if they did, then there most assuredly used to be a very special and high quality stone in that "large hole", very probably a stone similar to the two not noticed by P. I. Micallef but by Joseph S. Ellul and which have, in fact, survived.

Hence, I don't deny that the first building of Mnajdra may date from 10,205 B.C., (op.cit., p.32.), even though, like V. Gordon Childe, L.-M. Ugolini and J. S. Ellul, I cannot at all accept P. I. Micallef's own preferred alternative date, which is 3,710 B.C. Incidentally, the slow decrease in the distance between the solstices to which the latter refers in this part of his book needs, I think, to be much more carefully distinguished from the astronomical phenomenon of the precession of the equinox. J. S. Ellul is very far from being the only one lacking an adequate grasp of this latter phenomenon, which results from our solar system's motion relatively to the celestial pole, while the former is (like the Earth's so called "wobble" beloved of several other authors and the Moon's "nutation"), if indeed it is anything, a function intrinsic to the solar system itself.

I happily accept, by the way, the truth of Paul's claim (p. 39.) that he and Alfred Xuereb were "the first researchers" to investigate (albeit none too professionally) the orientation of the Maltese prehistoric temples and their possible relationship to various celestial bodies.

It should, however, be noted that Joseph Ellul took his photograph of the Moon shining through the main entrance at Ħaġar Qim at its major standstill rising position on 29 June, 1988 (the 1991 time-and-date stamp you may have noticed in our copy indicates not when this still photograph was originally taken, but only when a copy of it was incorporated in a most intriguing and highly informative video-film, a copy of the whole of which is now in my possession), and that not because he only then became interested in such phenomena, but because he had been obliged to wait until the Moon's relatively infrequent occupation of that precise position coincided with good enough weather successfully to take the photograph he wanted - and it was, in fact, a case of his being only the second time lucky - but then, of course, Joseph is no "researcher", simply a local man who, like his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents before him, knows his onions, and one or two other things as well.

And here I must resist the temptation to digress into a detailed explanation of how urine may be used to help preserve prehistoric as well as more recently constructed stone-walls. The specific importance and value of oral history has already been acknowledged by several universities and schools around the world, and theologians, too, are nowadays becoming much more aware of the primacy of "koinonia", which is what Pope John-Paul II fundamentally means by "Solidarity", fidelity to that family- and community-tradition which is essential for the transmission of any authentically religious Faith worthy of its name, and which, indeed, is as it were identical with it. Such, moreover, both in the Old Testament and the New was ever the significance of the laying on of hands.

Also, pace Andrew Sinclair, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy it is this same reliance on a community- as distinct from a socially divisive reliance on any radically individualist-sense for tradition and Tradition, and not at all gnosis as such which essentially separates true Christians and Gnostics from the 'gnosticism' of those early "gnostics" these otherwise unusually well informed authors imagine were only improperly distinguished from 'Christians'.

• "We want a path that would not be opposed to our life; a life that would not be opposed to our path. In short, we want a harmonious integration of the spiritual with the material along an accessible path, one not too estranged from the common culture. We want to attain plenitude without denying life's marvellous effervescence; we want a light and moving joy that would bring us to a larger, more all-encompassing experience of reality." (Daniel Odier, Desire (Inner Traditions International, 2001, p.4. His French original, Désirs, passions & spiritualité - L'unité de l'être, was published by Éditions JC Lattès in 1999.)

Words and finite numbers are always insufficient tools, which is why art and especially liturgy are the communication of society. Although far too large a question to explore here, interested inquiriers into such vital issues may access any of 69 other currently live links to relevant Internet addresses from within Freke & Gandy's above mentioned website. Their Jesus and the Goddess (Thorsons, 2001) is also a welcome addition to the rapidly growing literature, and is clearly a work of some considerable scholarship.

Paul Micallef wrote (p.42):

• "There is only one solar temple in the Maltese islands."

Joseph Ellul's already mentioned table of alignments refutes that, and both editions of his book include a photograph of the entrance to the High Chapel at Ħaġar Qim showing the Sun at the Summer Solstice setting exactly in front of the doorway and behind the distant horizon on top of a hill on 21 June.

In 1999, moreover, Daniel Cilia also took an excellent photograph of this same phenomenon, which, all being well, will feature prominently in a book of his that is due to appear in February 2002.

Instead of accompanying you next on a journey through appendices A and E to the 3rd edition of Paul's book, I turn now to Chris Micallef's just published "Alignments along the main axes at Mnajdra temple," which first moved me to write my present piece. In a sense, his title says it all!

Like Paul's, so Chris's attention remains clearly and sharply focussed on the alignments "along the main axes" in a structure that, although he well knows it to be only the "lower temple" (R.I.L.K.O. Journal, no. 59, p.16, paragraph 2), he introduces to us in both the opening sentence of his Introduction, and, before that, in the very title of his entire article much more boldly and dramatically, simply as "the Mnajdra temple" and "Mnajdra temple" - even though, truth to tell, this building was never designed to serve as 'a temple' at all!

(One doesn't come across many stone cots for babies inside temple buildings, for instance, yet, on the day that the Great Flood swept all other forms of life away from these precincts, a sleeping baby remained undisturbed in its well constructed and thoughtfully located place of rest, and there its skeleton was left in peace for centuries and millennia, until our modern exploratory excavations and clearing work brought it to light.)

As well as very heavily relying on all the other main results of Paul's earlier work, Chris has similarly accepted Mnajdra's "standard archaeological dating", i.e. 3,000-2,500 B.C.

Neither author seems to be aware that when founder of the University of Malta, distinguished historian and eminent medical doctor, Professor Sir Themistocles Zammit assigned "the early Tarxien phase" to 3000-2500 B.C., he wished to signify that that phase couldn't possibly have occurred more recently in time; he had never the slightest intention of denying the very considerable likelihood of its having taken its inception from some very much earlier date - and there is now, notwithstanding the successive thefts of various pieces of evidence by several individuals, both Maltese and foreign, as well as the wanton destruction of a quite significant portion of the other remaining evidence, occasionally out of sheer carelessness but sometimes as a result of deliberate, if ill-informed, official policy, despite all that, I say there remains even now more than sufficient evidence for us reasonably to conclude that Gordon Childe's earlier date, 10,000 B.C. is far, far more likely.

A more general observation seems appropriate. Temi Zammit had learned most of what he later knew about Maltese stone from Joseph S. Ellul's father, Carmel, who had served for many years as his site-manager and works-foreman mainly at Tarxien, and who afterwards began working, like Joseph after him, as the official guide at Mnajdra and Ħaġar Qim, where all three temples rest on land that was already being farmed by the Ellul family when the excavations first began there in the early years of the 19th century. Now, since it was Temi who founded the University of Malta, he quite obviously never himself attended it as a student - and the same is true not only of all its early academic staff but also, and this is an important point, of many members of staff who are still in post...

Kurt Schildmann, planet Earth's current foremost authority on pre-Vedic writing, recently highlighted the need he now feels to be urgent for incompetent academic specialists in several areas of ancient knowledge to be, without any further a do, invited to retire and, if necessary, dismissed, and I certainly have made no secret of his clearly expressed position in this regard.

In the case of Malta and Gozo there are also special difficulties which flow from the Republic's strategic and militarily important position in or very close to the geographical centre of the Mediterranean and, indeed, according to some of our more ancient surviving maps, of the entire world. Certainly, the history of these islands teaches us that they have always been of very considerable economic and political importance. In their case, small isn't only beautiful!

Thus, most autocthonous Gozitan and Maltese citizens of my generation I have so far encountered are well aware of the rarely publicised squabbling over the islands' natural petroleum reserves, in which at different times British, Italian, Libyan and Russian spear-headed businesses, as well as more than one multinational concern, have expressed some degree of interest.

And yet, human nature being what it is, and whether with all that oil or without it, enterprise-Malta is a very expensive conglomerate to organize and administer, which was probably Great Britain's main reason for so vigorously, though covertly, encouraging this or that highly placed Maltese politician to stir up a popular campaign in favour of its rapid promotion to full autonomy and self-responsible Independence...

True or not, reprehensible or not, such goings on are no novelty. Neither are they a Maltese or Gozitan monopoly.

On Malta, and I write in the light of my own experience in the first half of August 2000, high Summer temperatures typically militate against cooly balanced argument. Comfortably and relatively cooly housed country-villa owners still quite naturally, though entirely improperly and wickedly, continue to resist any suggestion that mainland Malta ought by now to be constructing its own reservoir to reduce ever escalating desalination and anti-flood expenses.

Obvious? But with the vast majority of its better educated citizens still having spent some portion of their formative years abroad, only a very small minority of its townsfolk genuinely appreciate whatever now survives of the great Gozitan and Maltese local traditions and Tradition...

Recent reprints of Zammit's classic History, for instance, contain several obvious errors not of his making. Many illustrated guides are published with reversed illustrations, that no editor has seen any need to correct, of supposedly very well known, historically important sites.

Even Mgr Peter Saydon's first complete translation into Maltese of the entire Bible, not from St. Jerome's understandably defective Latin translation, but directly from such Hebrew and Greek originals or near-originals as are still extant, has, since his death, been seriously defaced by the introduction of several academically or pastorally more "correct" alternatives to his almost invariably theologically preferable and, certainly, much more deeply pondered choices of expression.

Earlier grammars and dictionaries often conveyed an impression that the Maltese language is either some sort of southern Italian dialect, or even just a mongrel assortment compounded out of all the different tongues spoken by all the various nationalities that have inhabited this archipelago at one time or another during the last 3,000 years. That, perhaps, is why, on the occasion of his own first visit to Malta and Gozo, even such an accomplished linguist as Pope John-Paul II said that Paul of Tarsus was probably unable to speak Maltese. Since Aramaic and Maltese were among the 60 languages in which he conveyed his Christmas Greetings to each and every one of us this morning, he has probably noticed their remarkably close similarities by now.

That Paul was ignorant of today's Maltese idiom is obvious, though he would still understand it very much better than I do - but when, as related in Chapters 27 & 28 of Acts, he first took his historic stand on the Maltese rock, he, though not St Luke, shared with his hearers and hosts an already ancient, well developed and common language, Phoenician, from which biblical Hebrew in common with several other Semitic languages, including modern Arabic, derives.

The Maltese language, therefore, especially as it is still spoken by older people both on Gozo and in, for example, Qrendi today, provides us with a uniquely important linguistic bridge mediating between biblical Hebrew and the spoken Aramaic of Jesus of Nazareth on the one hand, and on the other all more recent European languages, whether Classical or Modern.

That, I believe, is why, prior to their beginning work in the Holy Places on their first original edition of the Bible de Jérusalem, several French Dominican scriptural scholars first visited Malta to learn Maltese, so as to be able to make good use of Saydon's already published Maltese text as, how shall I put it, a not only at Christmas "crib" to help them with their homework...

Unlike Joseph Ellul and myself, some of today's generation of scholars utterly deny the historical veracity of the Christmas story, and many, Kurt Schildmann might say "most", have preferred not to do their homework. They have preferred to stray into alien pastures and to dabble their feet in polluted waters.

No doubt most of them have done this mainly out of ignorance and quite without malice. Nevertheless, repairing all the consequent damage may prove to be a much more difficult and demanding task than setting Afghanistan or the Palestinian West Bank to rights. It could very easily occupy us from now on well into the fourth millennium. In every sphere and at all levels, to destroy is easy, to build less so.

Christmas is the feast of Light! Just as an increasing number are already insisting that it is time for President George Bush junior and Prime Minister Tony Blair (which is, and don't let us forget it, simply journalese for you and I) to concentrate more on building up than on pulling down, more on providing a better future for all our children than on facilitating even more the slaughter of the innocent, so those of us who are Christians should now be making it clearer and clearer to our clergy that we are no longer content to accept the English Jerusalem Bible or even the English New Jerusalem Bible as acceptable substitutes for something much closer to a literal translation into English of the original edition of Professor Mgr Peter Saydon's excellent Il-Bibbja together with all its original notes and maps.

Regrettably, as things stand at present, even the map of the Exodus in a recent officially approved reprint of the Maltese text quite atrociously betrays Saydon's much more faithful delineation of Moses' historic route across the Red Sea.

In this respect, as in so many others, our French-speaking brothers and sisters are already much more fortunate. Church leaders within the International English-speaking world sometimes compromise their theology, I fear, by excessive kowtowing to current notions of politico-ecumenical expediency and gender/academic correctness. The People of G-d cannot afford to let them get away with that for ever.

So, if Chris Micallel or any other Maltese writers are finding it difficult not simply to drift with the tide rather than to swim against it, they are certainly not alone!

Living in Exeter, with Sir Norman Lockyer's planetarium in Sidmouth just down the road, I have no quarrel at all with Chris's exploitation of Alexander Thom's well known theories about ancient measurements. I would, however, recommend that he take a close look at Stecchini's appendix to Peter Tompkins' Secrets of the Great Pyramid and also at Bodvar Schjelderup's less easily obtainable The Language of Recognition: Book One - Evidence (ISBN 82 90206 03 8, 1986), wherein he can learn how much more the ancients understood by 'measuring' than either he or his "tutor and mentor", Professor Frank Ventura, seems yet to have realised.

I haven't space here to comment in detail about the results Chris obtained by running an astronomical computer program, and which he describes as "very interesting" and has tabulated for our convenience (loc. cit., pp.17-18). He makes no mention about the rather more interesting near correspondence of the Mnajdra complex's location at 35° 49' 40" North with that of the star Procyon at 35° 14' North in today's sky (cf. Mark Vidler, The Star Mirror - The Cosmic Symmetry of Heaven and Earth, Thorsons, 1999, p. 308), and if, as he states on page18, "no alignments with planets, Sun or Moon were found for Mnajdra middle temple and small trefoil temple", this can only be because he neglected to look for them. Like all other temples of this class on Malta, what Chris here calls the "middle temple" at Mnajdra has its main entrance aligned towards the rising or setting of the major stand-still of the Moon.

Chris is one of many archaeologists who have completely failed to notice or to take into account the very important and here highly relevant distinction that needs to be made between prehistoric remains of human fashioning such as are to be found, for example, in the British Isles and on Malta & Gozo, and structures technically too advanced to have resulted from human fashioning alone as, according to a fast-growing number of thoughtful researchers, is patently true of the Great Pyramid, the supporting platform at Baalbek and several ancient structures in South America.

Only in respect of structures belonging to this second group is, I suggest, any advantage likely to result from our carrying out any more highly refined measurements and sophisticated calculations of the sort that first made Sir Norman Lockyer so justifiably famous.

No doubt Chris and his tutor-mentor may, like Joseph S. Ellul, have been born without whatever special sort of genius is required to appreciate all the subtleties, nuances and sfumature of Lockyer's, De Lubicz's and Stecchini's importantly different results, but no great genius is required to notice that Malta's prehistoric temples are, indeed, oriented to the major-standstill of the Moon. This requires only common-sense - and a very great deal of patience.

Chris has clearly put a lot of effort into researching and composing this recent article. I think it is a very great pity that his "tutor and mentor" failed to remind him that none of Malta's megalithic temples date from the "bronze age" (as Chris implies at the foot of his "Table II" on page 18).

Notice, too, that the form of the structures he is discussing is never, as he repeatedly and quite mistakenly claims, "elliptical". It is, therefore, scarcely surprising that, as he honestly admits, he has found that their dimensions never conform to the Pythagorean Canon, which, as is now well established, wasn't used consciously by us humans until some time after the Neolithic Age, in other words, at a time when the construction of any new megalithic temples in this part of the world was already a thing of the past.

St Thomas Aquinas consistently taught that only the Holy Spirit can teach our heart. St John Bosco, the Roman Catholic Church's so far only named Master of Education, also teaches that, unless we enjoy the help and protection of her who now wishes to be known as The Lady of All Nations, all our so called "wisdom" is actually 'foolishness'. When Pope Paul VI visited a Salesian school in Bethlehem before the troubles had escalated to their present pitch, the children presented him with three mother-of-pearl encrusted wooden caskets, one filled with gold, a second with frankincense, and the third with myrrh. In return, he gave them his Blessing.

Peace grows out of mutual giving, not at all, as Chairman Mao once put it, "out of the barrel of a gun". I greatly rejoice in the welcome news that plans are already in hand to restore the ancient Buddhist rock-carvings recently vandalised by the Taliban, and I look forward to the day when the authentic Bible can similarly be liberated from the damage inflicted on it by 'believers'.

Meanwhile, I extend to all persons visiting this page my very best wishes for a Peaceful and Prosperous New Year 2002, and for a truly happy Life hereafter. May the Star of the Magi guide you along the Way. Shalom!

Postscript: 28 June 2002
(1) As noted in R.I.L.K.O. Journal, no. 60, Robert Cowley died on 9 June 2002. An obituary will be published in issue no. 61.
(2) A suitably modified version of the above paper was, thanks to Marian Green's inspired editing, published in the Summer 2002 Beltane Issue no.143 of Pagan Dawn - Revealing the Beliefs, Arts and Magic of the Old Ways (pp.31-34). Readers of that excellent journal - for "Mnjandra" please read "Mnajdra" on both the beautiful front-cover and at the top of page 31. The final paragraph on page 31 wrongly places partial blame for recent mishaps at Mnajdra on the shoulders of local quarry-workers. As mentioned above, they should not be scape-goated in this fashion. Those officially responsible for the preservation and upkeep of these monuments over the course of the last eighty years are far from innocent; the damage they have not prevented is greater by far than any resulting from vandalism. Note, too, that "Sir Norman Lockyer" is the name of one gentleman mentioned on page 32; "succumb" and "coincident" on page 33 need immediately before them "may" and "was" respectively; there is no "e" in the Maltese "Mdina". Chris Micallef's essay, cited on page 34, was never a "book" but, as stated above, his article as published in the R.I.L.K.O. Journal, no. 59. For "on he subject", please read "on the subject."
(3) Maltese is, at its roots, a pre-Biblical-Hebrew Semitic language full of secrets. According to Aquilina, "Mnajdra" means "the upmost rocky portion of a mountain eminence". Hence, it almost corresponds with the Anglo-Saxon-derived surname and place-name: "Hamer", which means "a rocky, crag-like outcrop, a word not too far removed from "haram" - a romanized spelling of the Arabic word for the Great "Pyramid". Ellul, however, believes that "Mnajdra" here more obviously relates to another Maltese word meaning, if I have understood him correctly, either "sheepfold" or, more generally, "pen for animals".
(4) I no longer believe the surviving prehistoric structures at Mnajdra, Il-Misqa and Ħaġar Qim in Malta are 8,000 years older than Stonehenge, because, like Ralph Ellis, I am now convinced that Stonehenge and Avebury are most likely both coæval with and intentionally related to the Great Pyramid.
(5) Fifty years' contact with the Maltese people, their history and culture, including thirteen recent research-visits to the archipelago, six times as the house-guest of the islands', in Erik Von Däniken's words, "only genuine archæologist", Qrendi-born Joseph S. Ellul of Zurrieq, author of Malta's Prediluvian Culture at the Stone-Age Temples with special reference to Ħaġar Qim, Għar Dalam, Cart-Ruts, Il-Misqa, Il-Maqluba & Creation, enhanced by an appreciation within this context both of Kurt Schildmann's recent decipherment of the Indus Valley script and of one-time Olduvai geologist J.D. Solomon's special insight into time, tempo and eternity, are noteworthy features in the background to our webmaster's above published discussion of Mnajdra's solar and lunar alignments.
Untransmitted footage from a video-tape of Graham Hancock's interview with Joseph S. Ellul at Ħaġar Qim exists and may be viewed by serious researchers. Hancock mentions in Underworld that Shaun Arrigo also invited him to view one of his own much more detailed video-film of some of significant submarine features he and his brother, Kurt, had been exploring in Malta's off-shore waters. Had this information been incorporated in the Channel-4 TV Underworld programme-series transmitted throughout the U.K. at 9pm on Monday, 11th, 18th & 25th February, 2002, they might have been factually less disappointing, less superficial in their impact and, visually, even more attractive. Not being himself an archæologist, Graham seems to have thrown away some of his better opportunities. Nevertheless, his book is a useful reference-tool for beginners.
(6) Readers of Laurel Seaborn's "Goddess Temples in Malta" in The Beltane Papers - A Journal of Women's Mysteries (Issue #27, Spring 10,002nd year of the Goddess, pp. 14-16), please notice that several of the Maltese prehistoric temples certainly pre-date by 2,000 years or more the 1st year of the unusually young Goddess, whomever she may be, that that periodical commemorates. If I am correct in identifying Neith as Ninharsag, she, of course, was already a fully professionally qualified Medical Officer and Scientist when she first settled on Earth (if Zecharia Sitchin's reading of the relevant Genesis text is correct) some 430,000 years ago. Marija Gimbutas has made many important contributions to human knowledge but, as regards Malta, seems to have accepted Evan's theories far too easily. Shildmann has, as mentioned above, already opened up for us a much safer and better way.

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